the preterite and the elect

there are two kinds of music, bad music and music that the people who know the bad music is bad think is good, but disagree about.

Either way, when I was fourteen years old my friend Steve and I used to sit up all night debating this question, going back and forth - we couldn't decide! It seemed obvious that everything must be a matter of opinion, our smug atheism made that much a given; yet how could anyone, we marvelled, not be able to hear that David Bowie was better than REO Speedwagon? Engaging with pure chart pop answered this question to my satisfaction for a while, but when you bring up "good taste," I think there is such a thing as authority. That is: I'd take Julio's taste in free jazz to be better than mine, 'cause he's heard more of it, and thus has access to (in a manner of speaking) a bigger alphabet.

am I not understanding the question?

Although this suggests that the primary component of "good taste" may be stubbornness...

how did engaging with pure chart pop answer the question for you? and are you implying it stopped answering it?

regarding authority, I'm somehow tempted to quote nietzsche, but I don't even know anything about nietzsche. (i.e., why should a person with 'bad' taste give a shit about the authority of the person with good taste?)

One possible way to re-write the PvsE critical stance is this: there are people who can talk about music in a coherent and intelligent (non-tautological?) way, and there are people who can't or who don't care to. This removes A LOT of detail from your original stance: it says nothing about the music either the P or the E tend to like. This may be something to recommend about it.

I'm glad you posted this here instead.

I think the thing for me is MONEY: I can only spend so much on records and you just make a judgement as to what you think its best.

nothing to do with 'taste' (i don't like that word, either).

(I'd like to hear what j0hn has to say)

But I'll just say glibly that as a matter of social fact in 21st century North America and Europe, the claim that there can be no adjudicating is wrong, since people give reasons for their opinions all the time, persuade other people to re-listen, are persuaded themselves, sometimes hear with different ears and change judgments.

People give reasons and persuade others, but even when they get everyone they know to accept their opinions, they can't rest assured that the opinions will stand (otherwise, the opinions wouldn't be considered "opinions"). So - if we're the group in question here - we accept that opinions can be supported, and that some opinions can be better than others, whereas we also believe that no opinion is unassailable. And someone who holds out against the common opinion of the group, believes that Dave Matthews is better than James Brown (or that Hitler was a better man than Churchill, or whatever) can't be dismissed as insane in the way that someone who has seen me and knows me but believes I have no legs can be (even if my ideas have no legs). And everyone who isn't a social retard follows the social conventions I've described, no matter what he or she says in such forums as this. Which raises the question, what is going on when people claim, contrary to how they actually behave, that an opinion is just one person's word against another's and that there is no adjudicating.

Do other places not have these kinds of issues, and therefore go through life happy and carefree? Is this thread about snobby critics who write as if their opinions were fact, and the group of people who take their writings as such? Are facts just opinions that have become too tiresome or costly to society as we know it to contest? Are there any guarantees in life?